1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic document management and, more particularly, a management solution for electronic documents which can be utilized after the document has been deployed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic documents are a cornerstone of digital computing. These documents cover a wide variety of types and purposes—from the spreadsheets and word processing documents used in daily business activities to digital music and video files used for leisure. Organizations often use a variety of electronic documents to calculate, present, and store information that is vital for daily business functions. Advances in personal electronics even allow electronic documents to be created and/or received by an abundance of devices, such as mobile phones and personal data assistants (PDAs).
Since electronic documents contain such a vast amount of important information, security is a significant concern. In order to address this issue, many different techniques have been developed to protect electronic documents. Using one technique, an electronic document can be encrypted via an encryption algorithm. Although effective for preventing unauthorized viewing by those without the proper decrypting algorithm, this method is unable to provide fine-grained permission control over an electronic document. Additionally, encryption is an “all or nothing” form of protection; either all data sections of the document are encrypted or none. The protection of the document ceases once it is decrypted. Further, a decrypted document can be copied and sent to others. Therefore, the original owner loses control of the electronic document once it has been deployed and decrypted.
Another technique often used for protecting documents utilizes server-based protections assigned by a file server. The most common practice of this technique is the use of file permissions available through the server's operating system. However, once the document is removed from the server and/or server-controlled environment and is deployed to a remote device, as in an email attachment, for example, the protection afforded by the server's permissions ceases. The document is again vulnerable to unauthorized access and use.
Online collaborative systems attempt to address the shortcomings of encryption and server permissions by creating a self-contained working environment for electronic documents. Like server protection, these systems are good at protecting documents only if the documents remain within the self-contained environment. Since access to the documents is controlled by the system, users are unable to access documents when not connected to the system, typically requiring some form of network access. Users are further inconvenienced by being forced to use the tools or applications provided by the system.
Furthermore, these conventional techniques are often limited to a specific operating environment or platform and to particular types of supported electronic documents. They lack the ability to apply access at varying granularities to designated sections of data contained within the electronic document, regardless of the accessing application.
Security is not the only issue with electronic documents management that results from the shortcomings expressed above. Other management challenges exist for deployed electronic documents, such as coordinating changes among multiple deployed copies of an electronic document, applying user specific settings to an electronic document accessed by multiple different users, rescinding already disseminated electronic documents, updating material contained within deployed electronic documents, and the like. The fundamental problem with existing systems is that control over an electronic document is surrendered once the document has been deployed.